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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Outside In | Strange fruit hanging from a mango tree
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Outside In | Strange fruit hanging from a mango tree

In the summer of 2014, the brutality of the killing of two teenage girls in Badaun serves as a reminder of the lynchings in the American deep South

In the wake of the Badaun rape case, an artist draws a painting raising issues of women safety in Moradabad. Photo: PTIPremium
In the wake of the Badaun rape case, an artist draws a painting raising issues of women safety in Moradabad. Photo: PTI

In the summer of 2014, the brutality of Badaun serves as a reminder of the lynchings in the American deep South. Yet, strangely, the Badaun killings of two teenage girls also appear to be far removed from the consciousness of urban India.

In the summer of 1930, another photograph—very similar to the ones that have come out of Badaun—appeared in America. It was of the lynchings of two black men in the town of Marion, Indiana, a northern state. The black and white picture shows Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith hanging from what the Chicago Tribune said was an elm tree but was probably maple. The men look like they may have been beaten to death or near death before being hanged. Their shirts are in tatters, and there are blood stains on them. One wears a pair of stained trousers. The other has a piece of cloth draped around below his waist.

Ringing the large tree are well-dressed men and women, all of them white. Some are in hats. A tall man is smiling. Another man in a Hitler moustache points to the dead men, revealing a tattoo on his arm. The town’s wedding photographer Lawrence Beitler probably took his time to compose what was to become America’s most famous photograph of a lynching. On the day, he had taken along an eight-by-ten inch view camera, a tripod and flash powder.

A third person, 16-year-old boy James Cameron, too was dragged out to the tree to be hanged. But the lynch mob let him off. He said later that a woman’s voice had cried out, “Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or killing." The voice, he said, was feminine, sweet and clear, but no one could corroborate his version of events. Until his death in 2006, James Cameron remained one of the very few survivors of an American lynching.

In 1937, a Jewish schoolteacher in New York, Abel Meeropol, chanced upon the photograph, which inspired him to write a moving poem called Strange Fruit. The photograph “haunted me for days", he said later. Set to music and made famous by jazz singers Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, it has become a classic. Its first stanza goes:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

The Badaun cousins, aged 14 and 15, were probably dead before they were strung up from a mango tree in their village, Katra Shahadatganj in Badaun district, on the night of 27 May. The next day, crowds gathered around the tree. They sat around the tree, watching the girls. One was in an orange kameez with matching purple salwaar.

The other wore a green salwaar kameez with silver prints. Their bodies swayed gently, shirts flapping in the breeze.

There’s a video of it on YouTube. A wail rises up from among the women in the squatting crowd. It’s a ritual wail that you hear from mourners across northern India.

A year after the Marion lynchings, the Indian writer Munshi Premchand wrote a short story, in which he used the mourner’s wail to build atmosphere. In Sadgati (deliverance), when Dukhi the lower caste (chamar) dies trying to split a log on the orders of the village priest (a Brahmin), the community refuses to take the body. Instead, they sit around it. At night, the women begin to weep and wail. “A chamar’s cry is inauspicious," says the Brahmin’s wife.

On 9 June, President Pranab Mukherjee, outlining the new government’s priorities, declared, “In the recent past, the country has witnessed some gruesome incidents of violence against women. The government will have a policy of zero tolerance for violence against women, and will strengthen the criminal justice system for its effective implementation."

But law and order is, of course, a matter that falls under the jurisdiction of state governments—and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ubiquitous on Twitter and Facebook, was yet to condemn the Badaun killings until 10 June. Indeed, he was beaten to it by the US, whose State Department spokesperson Marie Harf said: “Like so many in India, we were horrified to learn of these violent sexual assaults and murders. As we have said, changing laws and changing attitudes is hard work. We applaud the many individuals, government officials, and civil society groups in India that are working to protect the survivors, to prevent gender-based violence, to help it try to change what is really hard to change."

It took the US over a century to overturn laws and change attitudes, so that terms like “zero tolerance" are no longer just empty promises of election manifestos.

According to one estimate, 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites were lynched between 1882 and 1968 with a peak around the late 1800s. From 1882 to 1968, nearly 200 anti-lynching Bills were introduced in Congress. Seven presidents between 1890 and 1952 petitioned Congress to pass a federal law.

So far, in India, the Badaun killings of two innocent cousins, who were raped on their way to the village fields to relieve themselves, have led to calls for building more toilets in villages. This is important, but it is grotesque to narrow the debate down to toilets. What will we do if the rapists force their way into toilets? Talk about building doors with stronger wood? Such are the “really hard to change" attitudes that the US is talking about.

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Published: 12 Jun 2014, 11:37 PM IST
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